Physics Week in Review: February 1, 2014

The big news this week — for me, at least — was the release of my new book, Me, Myself and Why: Searching for the Science of Self, which traces various scientific strands that weave together to make us the people that we are.

Thanks to that Atlantic excerpt, I heard about a wonderful project related to this notion of what our "stuff" says about our selves: "Significant Details is a series of interviews with women in science. ... All interviews start from a specific object, a 'significant detail' from the women’s scientific life. They can be scientific objects or something completely different that is related to science only by the women’s experience."

Of course, no sooner had the book been published, when the Time Lord and I took off for two and a half weeks in Southeast Asia -- just in time for the lunar new year (welcome to the Year of the Horse) -- with spotty Internet access. So there will be no Physics Week in Review the next couple of weeks. Sorry! Jen-Luc Piquant will be back on the job with her usual roundups come February 22. In the meantime, here's a whole bunch of stuff to fill the time this weekend.

Bouncing Beethoven Off the Moon: "'Earth – Moon – Earth,' by Scottish artist Katie Paterson. Paterson translated Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata into Morse code and bounced it off the moon via Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) transmission. The artist explained: 'The moon reflects only part of the information back – some is absorbed in its shadows, ‘lost’ in its craters … Returning to earth fragmented by the moon’s surface, it has been re-translated into a new score, the gaps and absences becoming intervals and rests. In the exhibition space the new ‘moon–altered’ score plays on a self-playing grand piano.'" There is an audio clip here.

Perfecting the Art of Sensible Nonsense: A new cryptographic scheme obfuscates computer programs by transforming them into something akin to a jigsaw puzzle in which random elements make each individual piece look meaningless.

Most Destructive Space Battle Rocks Virtual Universe. The equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars was lost in the EVE Online universe as thousands of gamers were thrown into the "The Bloodbath of B-R5RB."

NOISE, A Short Film That Explores White and Black Noise Through Motion Capture.

George Johnson's "eloquent hate letter to the tumbleweed": How Tumbleweeds Spread Radiation From Old Nuclear Sites.

A mathematical look at frog choruses: a further attempt to understand croaking. SCIENCE!

Back to Light: Artist Caleb Charland Uses Fruit Batteries to Illuminate Long-Exposure Photographs. "The artist uses nails inside fruit connected with copper wire to create functional batteries. Harnessed to a small lightbulb, the current is sufficient enough to provide illumination for long exposure photographs. Effectively, the organic batteries create enough voltage to light their own portrait."

The shortest science paper ever published had no words and was utterly brilliant. Plus other amusing abstracts, including one on those infamous faster-than-light neutrinos a couple of years ago. "A group from the H.W. Wills Physics Laboratory in Bristol and the Indian Institute of Technology wondered, "'Can apparent superluminal neutrino speeds be explained as a quantum weak measurement?' Their abstract succinctly and bluntly answered that question: 'Probably not.'"

The Math Aficionado's Guide to High-Fives: math with animated GIFs! "The Asymptote. This representation of one of the coolest behaviors a function can have is also good for germaphobes afraid of physical contact."

If Birds Left Trails Like Tracer Bullets, It'd Look Like This: "Dennis Hlynsky, a photographer/filmmaker and professor at Rhode Island Institute of Design, has been filming various bunches of birds — murmurations of starlings, murders of crows, and others — with a technique that shows each bird’s trail, in images, from the preceding two seconds."

Fun for kids and adults: Make paper models of Platonic solids and learn why there are only five of them.

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